Weather Unit Comments

Lesson:

 User: Paula Giese [pgiese@gold.tc.umn.edu] 
 Subject: Graphic files are too big 
 Date: Sun Jul  2 05:20:24 EDT 199D

Comments: I'm pointing to both Gr 2-4 and middle/hischool weather units on a resource intended for Indian teachers, schools, students: http://www.fdl.cc.mn.us/~isk/ which is running on the Minnesota Fond du lac Ojibwe reservation main server. However, your imagemap for the 2-4 lessons, and the intro screens for the actual on-line older student lessons are far too big! These files take so long to load, and there is nothing to them, no reason for you to use such huge images. Color-reduce (with Photoshop) to a maximum of 16 dithered colors. Beter yet, redesign the imagemaps so they use spot-color drawings and can be reduced to 4-6 colors. This will decrease the filesize by factors that depend on color distribution, but to about 1/3 of the present size, and speed loading accordingly. On your lessons, that students are actually to take on-line, where sometimes you do need a 256 color image, put a thumbnail iconpbutton on the page itself, and call the image outside. That way students will at least know they've got to wait. I find that many photos that are rather undetailed anyway can be reduced to dithered 16 colors without losing too much I want to present. Remember that students have less pateience than adults. If even I am awaiting the image load with yawns and foot-tappings, students are likely to turn off altogether.

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